Preparing Your Final Files

Before you start
Publication Agreement
Open Access
Preparing Your Final Draft

IMPORTANT

There will be a long delay before we get your typeset, copyedited paper prepared and in print.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of submissions we have received in recent years. At the same time, our acceptance rate has remained fairly stable. Thus, there are many more papers that need to be carefully guided through the production process.

There are two ways to deal with this increase:

Impose a substantial pause on accepting new papers. This option would particularly harm early-career philosophers of science, who have a limited number of suitable venues for their work and can’t afford to wait as long as later-career folks.

Substantially increase the cost of the journal to cover the labour costs involved in publishing more pages per year. This option would particularly harm low-income readers and institutions. Because a delay in production is closer to an inconvenience than a harm, we’ve chosen this path.

You can see how many papers are ahead of yours in the queue here.

We do aim to get your final draft online as soon as possible, usually within a few weeks. This means that your paper will be issued with a DOI, and should count as published for the purposes of your CV, hiring/promotion boards, grant committees, and so on.

Because the final version you send us will appear online for some time before you can ask for corrections, it is vital that you closely follow the instructions below. If we have to intervene in your manuscript to make it meet the required amendments, this increases the chance of errors being introduced into your paper.

Publication Agreement

We cannot publish your paper without a signed publication agreement.

You can find a copy of the publication agreement here. This must be uploaded with your final files.

Please provide all information requested on page 1 and your signature on page 4.

Co-authors may grant one author permission to sign on their behalf. The signing author must tick ‘Author signing on behalf of joint author(s)’ and list the names of all co-authors.

Open Access

There are three OA routes: Green, Gold CC BY-NC, or Gold CC BY. More details on each of these options below.

The BJPS is already Green OA compliant, so you do not need to request this option. Note that many funders, such as the ERC, only require Green OA. To comply with ERC guidelines, you must simply deposit a copy your paper in an online repository after the BJPS’s 12-month embargo period elapses.

Please contact the BJPS Editorial Office directly if you wish to pursue open access via the Gold CC BY-NC or Gold CC BY routes when sending us your final files.

Green Open Access

The University of Chicago Press supports green OA across its entire portfolio of journals. Authors have the ability, at no cost, to self-archive their own work and make it freely available through non-commercial institutional or disciplinary repositories. Authors may deposit either the published PDF of their article or the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM)—the version of the manuscript that is accepted for publication in the journal, after peer review and prior to copyediting—with a 12-month post-publication embargo on public availability.

If your funder requests an embargo of less than 12 months, you must apply for any available waivers from your funding body or institution. If a waiver is not granted, you may deposit your manuscript according to the terms of the mandate, but in that case, only the AAM (that is, not the typeset, copyedited version) may be deposited.

If your funder or institution requires that a Creative Commons licence be applied, you may only deposit the AAM. The AAM should be made available under a CC BY-NC license, which allows for its non-commercial reuse.

If your funder or institution states that an alternate licence, such as a CC BY-ND or CC BY licence, is required, you should apply (if possible) for a waiver and request to use the CC BY-NC instead. If you are denied permission to use a CC BY-NC licence, you may post the AAM in a green OA repository with a CC BY-ND or CC BY licence as required by your funder or institution.

Please note that most funder mandates can be accommodated with green OA, and it is the option to choose if your funder allows you to meet its requirement via the green OA route.

Gold CC BY-NC Open Access

The gold OA option is provided primarily for authors with research funding from an organization that mandates gold OA as a condition of publication and does not permit green OA as a route to compliance. The fee is $2,500. It is expected that the funder and the grant will be noted in the acknowledgments of the manuscript in the conventional manner. Articles published as gold OA are made available under a CC BY-NC licence.

Gold CC BY Open Access

If a CC BY or other license is required by your funding body, please notify the editorial office. Articles published under CC BY license are subject to an additional fee.

Preparing Your Final Draft

We aim to get your final draft online within a few weeks. This version will be the available version for some time, due to the long delay before we get your typeset, copyedited paper in print (see above). It will not be possible to correct errors during this period.

For this reason, it is important that you ensure your paper is as polished as possible. Similarly, it is important to follow the instructions on this page as closely as possible. Failure to do so will mean that someone at this end will have to fix things, and this increases the chance of errors being introduced into your paper.

Things to look out for in particular:

Anonymization: This version should not be anonymized. Add your name, fix/restore citations to your own work, and add any acknowledgements. (Note: Do not forgot to thank your referees!)

Citations: Check your citations, especially that you have provided page numbers for direct quotations. You will be required to provide this information during the copyediting process, but it will be considerably easier on you to source this information now. It will also be less annoying for readers of this version of your paper!

Accessibility and Readability

There are a number of steps we ask you to take in order to make your paper more accessible (e.g. for screen readers). These mostly amount to the advice: use your words!

As well as providing a caption for any figures, please also include alt text (and label it as such). Advice on how to write effective alt text can be found here.

Outside of mathematical notation, avoid using typefaces to convey meaning. Typefaces such as italics are not preserved by screen readers, so if they are doing any heavy lifting in your sentence, that meaning will be lost to listeners. Rephrase so your point can be understood.

For similar reasons, refrain from using font styles as shorthand (if you don’t, we will—and you may not like our alternatives!). For example, if you introduce a definition, law, or similar, give it a ‘readable’ name. For example:
- ‘The principal principle’ is acceptable; ‘principal’, ‘principal’, and ‘PRINCIPAL’ are not.
- ‘Ohm’s law’ is acceptable; ‘Ohm’, ‘Ohm’, and ‘Ohm’ are not.
- ‘The concept of dog’ is acceptable; ‘Dog’ is not

Keep abbreviations to a minimum, since they unnecessarily increase the cognitive load for the reader (UITCLFTR). A term that only appears a few times throughout the text does not need to be abbreviated.

Label only those things that you will be referring back to later in the text, whether they are points or equations, or anything else. Multiple numbered lists can lead to (1) ambiguity and (2) confusion, and (3) are mostly unnecessary. They also tend to suggest the point will be referenced later, and so unnecessarily increase the cognitive load of the reader.

Citations

Full details below on how to handle specific types of work you might want to cite, but this image highlights some of the key features of our referencing style

In-text citations

Be specific—do not use ‘ibid.’ and similar.

Be specific—cite page numbers where possible, and always for quotations (unless it is an online-only source).

Keep the details together: If the name of an author is mentioned, place the in-text citation next to it (otherwise, place it at the end of the sentence or relevant phrase).

Lists are arranged chronologically: (Bennett 1990; Smith 1995; Abbott 2000)

In-text citations differ depending on whether you are referring to the author(s) or the work.

- Referring to a person:
  As Smith (2001, pp. 145–56) argues…

- Referring to multiple people:
  As Smith (2001, pp. 145–56) and Jones (2022, chap. 7) argue…

- Referring to a work:
  As argued in (Smith 2001, pp. 145–56)…

- Referring to multiple works:
  As argued in (Smith 2001, pp. 145–56; Jones 2022, chap. 7)…

In-text citations of three or more authors or works should be moved to a footnote.

Articles

Smith, B. and Jones, A. (2019). ‘Pun-Based Titles: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop’, Journal of Warm Takes, 11, pp. 11–29.

Notes:

Single quotation marks
Punctuation outside of quotation marks
Title case for article and journal title
Journal name in italics
Volume number in bold
Issue number not required
Page numbers, not page range (leave blank for online-only sources or if no page numbers available)
Page numbers exclude all repeated digits but the final two (pp. 122–25)

Books

Smith, B. (1988). Remember When People Used to Read Books? Memoirs of a Grumpy Philosopher, Oxford University Press.

Notes:

Title case for book title
Book title in italics
Publisher name is required; if in doubt, the information can be found on WorldCat.
Where they differ, use the year of the edition you have consulted, not the year of original publication (to allow others to find your specific sources).

Chapters

Jones, A. (2019). ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’, in B. Smith and A. Jones (eds), The Big Book of Bad Ideas, Oxford University Press, pp. 13–32.

Notes:

Single quotation marks
Punctuation outside of quotation marks
Title case for chapter and book title
Book title in italics
Book editor(s) name(s) required, followed by (ed.) or (eds)
Page numbers required
Page numbers exclude repeated digits, except for the final two digits
Publisher name is required; if in doubt, the information can be found on WorldCat.
Where they differ, use the year of the edition you have consulted, not the year of original publication (to allow others to find your specific sources).

Online-Only Sources

Smith, B. (unpublished). ‘Why Everyone Else Is Wrong’, available at ⟨arxiv.org/1234.5678⟩.

Jones, A. (2004). ‘People Might Actually Read This One’, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available at [url goes here].

Smith, A., Smith, B. and Smith, C. (2021). ‘OMG We Have Been Published!’, Ergo, 15, available at [url goes here].

Smith, A., Smith, B. and Smith, C. (forthcoming). ‘OMG It’s Happening Again!’, Ergo, available at [if one exists, url goes here].

Smith, B. and Jones, A. (2020). ‘OMG We Have Been Published!’, Epoch Times, 13 May, available at ⟨epochtimes.com.org/1234.5678⟩.

Notes:

Papers deposited in online archives such as arXiv and PhilPapers, as well as on personal websites, should be marked ‘unpublished’.
Papers that have been accepted for publication but are only available as ‘online first’ and/or have yet to be assigned to an issue should be marked as ‘forthcoming’. Please provide the DOI. Please do not include page range; this is not the same as page number and will mislead readers.
Wherever possible, please provide the stable url (for example, https://doi.org…).

Ph.D. Theses

Jones, A. (1981). ‘A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Hard Knocks.

Technical Reports

Smith, B. (2015). ‘Corporate Side-Hustle: Baby Needs New Shoes’, Technical Report TYE-234, Dollars-R-Us Associates.

Figures

Figures require both a caption and an alt text description. Label each clearly. Advice on how to write effective alt text can be found here.

Where permission to reprint is required, it is the author’s responsibility to obtain it. Evidence of permission to reprint should be included as part of your final files. It is also the author’s responsibility to include acknowledgements as stipulated by particular institutions or publishers for the reproduction of such figures or tables.

Figures will be printed in black and white by default. Colour printing can be arranged for a fee (please the editorial office for a quote). We can make colour versions available as an online-only enhancement at no cost, but because they will appear in black and white in the print edition, the figures’ captions and the main text should avoid using colour terms to describe the figure.

The main text should make explicit reference to the figures (for example, ‘see figure 1’). The figure will be placed as close as possible to its first mention, but it is unlikely to appear exactly where it is in your final files.

Please provide figures in their original files (and not embedded in a word document, for example).

Photographs need to be 20–26 picas wide at 300 DPI to meet minimum quality standards for print.

Data and code

Data/code made available during the peer-review process should continue to be made available to readers in an online repository.

If there is some reason this cannot be done, contact the editorial office immediately.

The anonymized links for peer review should now be replaced with the stable URL.

Language

Overview

Parochial references—such as ‘this country’, ‘our legal system’, ‘the Department of Education’, ‘the Constitution’, and so on—should be avoided. Be specific in identifying people, places, institutions, and other entities in full so it is clear for all readers.

No form of language or expression should be used that could be interpreted by a reader as being racist, sexist, derogatory of a particular religion or creed, or otherwise offensive.

Specifics

Abbreviations

Avoid the use of e.g., i.e., vs., viz., and etc.
Abbreviations: omit the end of a word or words. Include full points.	Lieut. cent. assoc. ed.
Contractions: omit the middle of a word or words. Omit full points.	Dr eds Mrs St
Acronyms: formed from the initial letters of words. Do not include any full stops (periods).	AWOL NATO UK USA
Place abbreviation in parentheses after the first occurrence of the full term. Thereafter, an abbreviation may be used without explanation. Reiterate full term in (sub)section headings.	The research was carried out by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in July 2007.
Tip! Do not use terms such as ‘ibid.’, ‘id.’ and ‘cf.’. As with ‘see above’ and ‘see opposite’, such terminology is irrelevant in digital form, where the page may be formatted differently and artwork, tables, and references are linked rather than placed in the text.

Capitalization

Title case	• Title of paper and section headings, ‘This Is the Introduction: All in Title Case’ • Use lower case for prepositions of any length and for after hyphenated prefixes: ‘Co-evolution’, ‘Non-linearity, ‘Pre-clinical’ • Use title case for books, journals, papers, chapters, section headings, and so on
Lower case	• Subsection headings, ‘This is a subsection: Largely in lower case’ • the Born rule, the principal principle, Newton’s law • chapter 1, section 2, equation 3, point 4, example 5, figure 6
Use capital letters only for proper nouns, and for the initial letters of the full formal names of institutions, organizations, buildings, and the like.	British Museum United Nations Bridge of Sighs
Do not use capital letters for common nouns.	Oxford University their university

Dates

British style formulates as: day, month, year.

11 November 1918

Ellipsis (...)

An ellipsis is used to indicate content omitted from a quotation.
You should use three full points, spaced from each other and from the words either side.	‘Political language [. . .] is designed to make lies sound truthful.’ As Smith explains: ‘[…] once you pop, you just can’t stop’.
Where the preceding sentence ends immediately before the ellipsis, remove the punctuation. Exceptions: quotation marks, exclamation marks, question marks.	‘A nightingale began to sing [. . .] It was a strange sound to hear.’ ‘Where was Godfrey? [. . .] They said he was murdered yesterday.’

Em rules (—)

Twice the length of an en rule.
Oxford style uses it as a parenthetical dash. No space is required either side of the em rule.	There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

En rules (–)

Longer than a hyphen.
Used to close up elements that form a range.	pp. 23–36 1939–45
Used to express a connection or relation between words; roughly meaning ‘to’ or ‘and’.	Monday–Saturday Dover–Calais
Used instead of a solidus (/).	parent–offspring relationship Lotka–Volterra equations

Hyphens (-)

Used to join words together to form compound terms and expressions.	short-lived phase-space
There are often no hard-and-fast rules, so consult your dictionary to determine whether two elements should be hyphenated, run together, or set as single words, and apply one form consistently.	airstream, air stream, or air-stream
There are some particular rules that govern placement of hyphens in compound terms and expressions depending on how the terms and expressions are made up. No hyphens after adverbs	a well-known story (but: the story is well known) the softly spoken man
Words with prefixes are usually written without hyphens, unless there is a collision of vowels or consonants.	predetermine multinational but anti-intellectual pre-eminent
Note that ‘cooperate’ and ‘coordinate’ should be spelt without a hyphen.

Formatting figures

In non-technical texts, separate using comma, not space, in numbers of five digits or more.	1000 10,000 250,000
Note that in texts where numbers are frequently used:
Remove the comma for numbers of four digits or more.	1000
For decimal quantities of less than one insert a zero before the point. Use a full point on the line for the decimal point (not at midline).	0.5 0.768
Include final two digits in number ranges.	25–26 120–22 1001–22
Tip! Use an en rule (–) between the numbers in a range (pp. 123–29, 1939–45, or 9.30–5.30).

Italics

Consistent application of italics throughout the text is crucial.	Italic type
Avoid the use of italics for emphasis
Avoid italics for naming definitions, proofs, theorems, and so on (where necessary, use quotation marks instead)
Use italics:
For non-English words	the catenaccio defensive system employed by the Italians a posteriori a priori et al. inter alia prima facie qua c. (circa) de novo ex parte ex post facto in situ joie de vivre passim raison d‘être stare decisis
For binomial nomenclature	Homo sapiens
For titles of books, journals, works of art, films, and other self-contained works.	A Christmas Carol Journal of Infectious Diseases Mona Lisa The Times West Side Story

Roman

For the names of places and institutions.	Pont du Gard Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
For foreign or Latin words that have become naturalized into English.	It was a delicious croissant.

Serial or Oxford comma

In a list of three or more items, insert a comma before the ‘and’ or ‘or’.	red, white, and blue feminine, masculine, or neuter
No comma is used for two items in a list.	convex and concave

Numbers: Figures or words?

Spell out numbers up to and including nine and use figures from 10. (Note that where they are necessary, compound numbers are hyphenated.)	four 25 117
Exceptions:
units of measurement (use figures);	3 kilometres
dates (use figures);	12 May 1950
approximate numbers (use words);	Two hundred and fifty gold bars were stolen.
at the beginning of the sentence (use words);	One thousand people came.
round numbers of a million or more (use figures and words)	£8.5 million

Quotation marks

Quotation marks are not used around displayed quotations
Use single quotation marks first; use double quotation marks for quoted matter within a quotation.	Weber saw it as embodying ‘the typical power of the “non-economic”’. ‘Have you any idea what “red mercury” is?’

Solidus (/)

Use en-dash	parent–offspring relationship Lotka–Volterra equations mind–brain interactions
black/white	The solidus used this way is ambiguous, so please specify: ‘black and/or white’ or ‘black and white’ or ‘black or white’

Spelling

Oxford spelling

Colour, behaviour, favour
Modelling, travelled
Programme, analogue, judgement
Analyse, scepticism, defence, centre
BUT: conditionalization, operationalize

Units of measure

When an abbreviated unit is used with a number, the number should be followed by a space.

10 g
1.423 km

LaTeX

Please consider your life choices.

A BJPS LaTeX template can be downloaded here.

Upload both the .tex file (plus .bib and any image files) as well as the pdf, since we’ll need the latter for reference.

Compile your .tex file on Overleaf to determine if it will compile in its entirety for us.

Sample Paper

Your question not answered here? Let us know.

Preparing Your Final Files

Table of Contents